HAND, HEART AND MIND

THE ‘Street’ in Wexford County Hall will be the venue for a large exhibition of abstract paintings by the Wexford-based artist John Noel Smith which will run from October 15 to December 2.

The writer and curator Catherine Marshall who has put the exhibition together said Smith’s ability to constantly develop his repertoire marks him out among abstract painters at home and abroad.

His scraped, washed and constructed paintings built up in layers suggest the use of precious materials in medieval manuscripts.The layered substance of the paint creates a sculptural aspect to the work. ‘There is no one dominant idea behind my work; rather it is a flotilla of concepts which combine to create the core idea,’ the artist has explained.

Smith has strong connections to County Wexford. His great grandfather farmed at Smith’s Cross in Ballycanew while his grandfather was the County Station Master from 1908 to 1915.

His own father moved to Dublin in the 1930’s where John Noel grew up in Malahide. He studied in St. Pater’s College from 1965, graduating in 1970, before attending Dun Laoghaire School of Art in Dublin from 1972 to 1976.

The ‘Deutscher Adademischer Austauschdienst’ scholarship (DAAD) brought him to Germany where he studied at the Universitat der Kunste in Berlin. He spent 22 years in Berlin pursuing a thriving career as a professional practising artist from 1980 to 2002.

He returned home to Ireland in 2002 and now lives and works in North Wexford. He is repre- sented by Hillsboro Fine Art Gallery in Dublin, the Fenderesky Gallery in Belfast and the Galerie Stefan Bartsch in Munich, Germany.

The County Hall exhibition will present selected works from 1993 to 2016.The event is in association with Wexford Arts Centre.

Art critic Theo Dorgan said every mark on the canvas of a Smith painting speaks of the human hand, heart and mind that made this thing you are looking at while also managing to exist in a place or time beyond our own.